stillborn in the morning sun
by cayoesqueleto
Summary: No one should die without a name, she insists. I’ll find hers.
1. Afterbirth

The pain comes in waves- heavy, undulating; a gasp for breath but it's nothing like drowning, certainly nothing juxtaposed to being underwater, spheres of air escaping flailing lips. Under the water there is a visible border where the surface meets air; there is hope, however fragile. _Here_- barely time to take a breath; it engulfs.

Half-awake under the blinding fluorescent light; she's slipping, a piece of driftwood with mooring (but of course metaphors never made sense to her either way): _blink, breathe_.

"_Bones."_ A face from the smog. _"Temperance."_

Hands curl into bloodied fists, clutching the sterile white sheets; fingers dug into palms to avoid needing his.

"_You were afraid of this,"_ he says, and it's not a question, just a statement_. "That's why you-" _Voice cracks_: "I'm sorry, Bones-"_

"_-Temperance,"_ he amends. _"It'll be all right."_

Warm hands close around hers, reach for her. The fingers stubbornly refuse to loosen.

* * *

_No one should die without a name,_ she insists_. I'll find hers._

* * *

Seven hours later ragged, labored breaths still echo through the hallway. They've told him to wait outside now and when he looked over at her her eyes were shut, chest rising and falling shakily. The doorknob leaks cold against his palm as he stalks out, still glancing back at the room.

The sheet is drawn up over her thighs, wet and wrinkled as the tendrils of hair clinging to her damp forehead.

He paces in the corridor.

"_She's crowning."_

She hears them through her tapered groans. Feels another peculiar lurch in her abdomen; the top of a tiny head (she imagines) protruding,_finally._ They're lost in a muddle of instruction: _breathe, slowly, now._

She moves her heavy skull in a brief left-to-right motion.

_Sure you can. Look at me. _

"_Booth…"_

The doors open again.

* * *

"_Don't tell me things are going to be all right," she snaps, then in a almost-whisper: "It's what they said the night they left; Christmas Eve."_

* * *

His hands cup her face slick with perspiration. _Bones,_ in an urgent whisper. _You're nearly there._

She thinks she knows what it's like to be in the throes of agonizing, never-ending death (ignoring all irony). The pain contracts, squeezes, progresses down her body in growing succession as she cradles the gentle swell inhibiting her midsection, biting the lower lip in a (futile?) attempt to curb all cries. Hands flutter, feeble, in the folds of the sheets.

_Exhale with the contraction_- she counts to three(hundred) and the searing, no, dulling now easing down her side.

"_Booth,"_ she whispers once more, and he is by her side.

* * *

The bearing of a child required more willpower than she ever though possible- not even in the darkest hour of a buried, wronged, early grave- but now. _Now-_

a warm sensation slithers from between her thighs, tumbling in a mass of blood and fluid. The delicate bundle uncurls, bloom-tunneling from the borrowed throbbing heat of her body. Gloved hands grasp the slippery child, bracing the cord drooping across its foot.

Birth- captured then, mother and child painting a mural of supposed beauty and miracles. Except she never wanted to be a mother and she wasn't sure if this changed her mind.

The child- a girl, she is told, but she doesn't get to touch (or glimpse, for that matter) her.

* * *

_These medical scans, for once, are not of bones or skeletons devoid of life. That aura of death doesn't linger sickly-sweet in the stale air. It's alive, she thinks, and at the same instant admonishes herself for depersonifying it, as if it were an object. Arbitral. Still, her fingers tremble tracing the curvature of a perfect cranium etched in ghastly blue-white._

* * *

He watches it through the glass, tangled in wires and sensors; the almost-steady beep of a machine counting the seconds until it breathed again. Saltwater stings his eyelids as he turns away_: no one should have to live like this,_ he thinks. _Certainly not_- tearing his eyes from the incubator- _her.__  
_

_(If she is to live, this is necessary. Necessity overrides dignity.)_

He wonders what her anthropology would have to say about this.

* * *

Awakening bestows her a throbbing skull and a numb lower section of body; lifting her heavy eyelids brings the world into focus. When the morning amnesia hits she's halfway out of the bed, unwilling to stay caged in sheets once again. As her bare feet hit the floor her side erupts in dulled, suppressed animal fury.

She finds him deep in slumber on the chairs outside. His eyes jolt open as she lowers herself onto the seat beside him.

"_Bones."_ He smiles, bleary expression and all. A moment later his brows shoot up in alarm. _"You shouldn't be walking around after-"_

"_I'm fine, Booth. Just-"_ she winces then; a bitter smile at the irony.

"_Have you seen her?"_ The sudden absolute clarity of his words startles her.

She twists the hem of the rough fabric round her fingers._ "No, I-"_

"_They say the odds of survival are thirty-seventy against." _

Her eyes meet his. _"Don't. That word… the possibility of life isn't a statistic."_ He blinks in surprise at the unsure, wavering quality of her voice.

_(She swallows hard then, realizing the muddling of lines; she would have murmured figures that didn't matter and he would have done the sentimental thing.) _

"_It's not your fault." _He glances over at her.

The green swing doors batter the air as she disappears back into the safety of the ward.

* * *

Two days later they find the ritualistic white cloth veiling death comes in different sizes.

The smallest has the dimensions of a regular tea towel, but it still crinkles surplus at the edges.

* * *

He lets them tell her after they've told him, and he half expects her to comfort herself with _I never wanted it anyway_, but her wounded gaze mirrors morbid confusion she doesn't bother to hide.

And he knows. She never did want a child, but anyone could've seen the apprehension (fear, almost) that came with proximity to one. Guilt overrode relief; she wouldn't have admitted in anyway.

So he sinks into the chair by her bed and waits, but there are no words to say all these.

Blue eyes meet brown, and both know the way she is proficient with bones and he with people.

* * *

The congratulatory flowers and balloons are all gone by the time she reenters the room, save for a single bloom he must have missed (she thinks he's the only possible candidate to have carried out this mass cleaning).

She has never been sentimental or one for symbolic gesture, but she can't help picking up the baby's breath, crushing the fragile petals battered by the wind, for what it represents and what needs to be forgotten.

Angela's obviously heard, too, and the phone rings soon after, oozing sympathy she doesn't need.

Later, in the bathroom alone, the tears finally come; undoing the impractical ribbon fastenings down her back she falters, but is careful to stifle all sound to avoid alerting him a door away.

* * *

A week later she is back at the Jeffersonian, standing long hours, carelessly inhaling experimental vapors, trying to forget that her job was exactly what caused the contractions in April, two months early- no, her _indifference_ to this life depending on her.

Everyone else exudes understanding, _too much_ understanding, and she feels like an alien in her own land. Booth stops by occasionally, but for weeks there is no case (she was supposed to be gone a month) and he's too careful around her and she loathes it.

"_Stop that."_ It just comes, one night with him in her office_. "Stop treating me like everything's changed."_

He stays silent this time, until she stalks out of the door; then speaks in a hoarse whisper: _"You would have made a good mother, you know. I still believe that."_

"_You believe in God,"_ she says, and her tone is flat but the implications clear.

* * *

It creeps up on her in quiet ways sometimes- the smaller-than-usual jumper hanging on a clothesline; garish gift-wrap discarded in the trash she's neglected to empty; the fragmented fetal bones brought in on a steel tray.

The last one they try to keep from her; Angela switches the holographic projections the moment she enters, Zack stammers a little more than usual and Hodgins doesn't have to pretend. Booth… his gaze lingers over her longer than usual, and he doesn't mention the stuffed skeleton he gave her what seems like a century ago.

* * *

They first stumble upon what can be done for her two months to the day. This particular case details another senseless tragedy: this time a missing child and a broken skull. Where the almost- infallible DNA fails the facial reconstruction reestablishing identity prevails; the artist watches as the almost-child takes shape: blonde, wavy hair, the photograph dictates; blue eyes, and the soft, wide-eyed stare isn't too far from the gaze she levels in concern every day.

The dark blue of Zack's lab coat materializes behind her, fingers bracing an examining tray supporting several off-white fragments. His brain- Britannica function is off and on the loose before Angela can curb the fact-spouting.

"Ghost children," he says, and when she looks quizzically up at him he doesn't seem to notice. "What if you had the chance to flip through a book depicting all the different children you could have had based on the infinite combinations possible with you and your mate's genes?"

He goes on about possible repercussions and other things, but Angela's heard enough.

"Would it be possible," she suppresses her excitement, "to construct a face using those genes, and then run it through-" she gestures "-my ageing matrix?"

"In theory, yes," he murmurs. "But this procedure is barely experimental…"

"But you can do it?"

"Well, there is this open source software with such claims." He pauses. "For what purpose?"

"It's for Brennan."

"I- I could try."

* * *

She notices it the day his quirkily- colored socks mellow into shades of dark blue and black; his ties and belt buckles remain, though, a painful reminder of what he had been- what _they_ had been. Only occasionally now did she allow the drifting into the tortured state of wondering what could have been. The memory stung, picking at old wounds, forcing unbearable lucidity; migraine of the conscious mind.

Parker runs circles on the lawn, blonde-golden hair tangled over his forehead as Booth watches, suddenly somber and she knows he remembers that tiny, delicate wisp of hair barely visible in the tangle of wires. It was a deep russet brown, she remembers, and in that realizes the almost- portrait of a happy family this is, with Booth and his son and the white picket fence, but this pretence is anything but a delusion. The sun-shielded, pale strip of skin on her fourth finger trembles against the soft grass as she pictures that sailboat gliding off into the blood-red sunset, ripples of water trailing in its wake.

* * *

The placenta worms its way out barely hours after the birth, staining crimson the white parabola, swirling in the water spiraling down the drain.

* * *

The missing pieces begin to fall into place four months after, when the painful reminder of a protruding abdomen subsides and he finally regards her in normal, almost jovial banter, but she knows neither of them forget.

Sully-_Captain Sully_, now, Booth had laughed- returns in one of the County Coroner's body bags; the zip teeth jerked from the fabric in obvious haste. The report provides a cryptic _CAUSE OF DEATH UNKNOWN_.

Brennan finds a dented, tarnished lump of lead, sifting through the river debris in the body bag.

* * *

The day she sees Angela in her doorway with a different smile flickering across her haggard, weary face- for once it is unsure, seeking reassurance, and she ignores a twinge of uneasiness at this reversal of roles.

"Bren," she says (without the routine 'sweetie') "I have something… can you take a look at it?"

"Of course," she says, but it is more obligation than real curiosity.

The color printout depicts a brunette, brown-eyed child about six years of age. There's no name at the bottom of the page; she looks up at Angela.

"You never gave her a name," she whispers almost sheepishly. "I didn't know…"

Molten fury rises in her eyes, the familiar sting of liquid trembling behind eyelid- dykes. They feel a lot like tears then, and she tastes pure sorrow, smearing saltwater down her cheeks_. It isn't anger; it isn't grief_, then, and a strange ambivalence settles over the fallen photograph.

"She would have looked a lot like this, you know." Her friend's fingers find hers. "Nothing certain, though. But…" Angela's voice trails away before rising again: "I thought you would like to know. To see."

"I do." She takes a breath. "Just not…this way."

It's the moment Angela realizes she's crossed the line drawn as grotesquely evident as the pale white-red of the umbilical cord severed an age ago, crudely etched in the rapidly desertifying middle ground.

As she turns to leave the unexpected words of passing finally emanate from her motionless friend:

"When I find her name," she says, carefully hanging to every word, "You'll know."

_(No one should die without a name,_ she insists_. I'll find hers.)_

* * *

_TBC. _

_A/N:_ The technology mentioned in this piece is purely imaginative.


	2. The Beginning

_two: December, the year before_

She'd made her morning coffee darker then, heaped spoonful after spoonful of the dark granules into the swirling water. Bitter brew, indeed, on mornings she waited painful hour after painful hour for the light to return to another body bag brimming skeletons. To tread the same cobblestone path through the park when cold winds batted fallen leaves, and to think of nothing but the solid ground beneath her feet. The bitter tang of the drink lingered, and she knows she poured the water faster than she should have, simply because her mind betrayed her some days, failing to differentiate powder from dirt and earth from fine, ground coffee.

Those were hard times, having nothing at all wrong with the world and still felling like one of those pale pink mackerel lifted from its aquatic dwelling (like _a fish out of water_, but on those days she never felt like being straightforward with anything either).

Some days it was easy: jaded, hardened by the inevitability of it all, when she would recite all two hundred and six names of the calcium, crystallized; she knew them all beyond the eerie, grotesque quality of the surface.

Her existence, then, was defined by lines: unspoken boundaries, the curvature of a rib, the series of grooves and bends of human anatomy. Weaved, dyed bands of color circling his ankles, twisting her persistent gaze. These lines had a beginning and an end (Alpha and Omega)- mostly she dealt with the ends, the ones so grotesque there remained only purgatory.

When a white fiberglass sailboat offers her the prospect of a beginning, she affords too many backward glances and decides to stay (_left behind_).

A week later another two, small parallel lines jolt her back into lucidity; her palm goes to her forehead in a muted _god, not this, anything but this_; shielding the suddenly painful, blinding sunlight.

* * *

He knows it's one of _those things_; she is uncannily agreeable that day, looking like she did handing her parents' casefile over to him. It was _something,_ he knew, enough to warrant such response from Temperance Brennan.

She doesn't look up from the bottom of her mug, preferring to eye the dregs floundering in the leftover brew than to meet his eyes _(his hopeful gaze)._

Following another week in the Jeffersonian, she decides not to tell them, not to tell even Angela. It doesn't have to be that way, but she figures they'll find out eventually, anyway.

* * *

On one of their early morning calls she claps a hand over her mouth, standing over a decomposed body complete with adipocere.

"It's… the smell," she says rather pathetically when he regards her with concern, her queasiness waning to a sudden, newly- discovered fear.

"You okay, Bones?" he asks as she straightens up, brushing the hair from her face. Zack looks on, bemused- almost as if saying _a scientist had no sense of all these_. As if to prove a point, she finds (in the next ten minutes) herself unable to concentrate on the remains, instead envisioning the blue plastic bottom of the bucket she'd retched into, trying to ignore the possible implications of this occurrence.

* * *

_She knows she shouldn't, not even now, but she can't help the first syllables of his name escaping her throat, and it's only after the name passes her lips that she realizes it's the wrong name; it shouldn't be Booth, it should be Sully, and- _

_He grasps her hand, then, but his voice is distorted: I'm sorry, it should be him here, shouldn't be anyone else-_

* * *

Barely two weeks later he finds out, following another confrontation with a murder suspect—she gets shot in the shoulder and he gets an appointment with the shooting board.

They say its substantial blood loss, but apparently it isn't substantial enough, because she wakes hours later with a throbbing head. He's on a chair by the bed, a folder balanced on his knee.

Her eyes widen—he has her medical file—and he gives a weary smile.

"You saw my records, Bones. I'd say it's only fair that I saw yours."

* * *

There is just them, in those months, the lab and the nameless skeletons lined in the hallway_. It_ becomes the elephant in the room, never spoken of; the presence of it felt always; it is now only the fleeting pain in her shoulder, the tender flesh running down his side: something their minds attempt to forget, something their consciousness harbors without intention.

They accommodate this void, they learn to, slowly- they learn to ignore the significance of absences. They learn to maintain silence without faltering, he learns to stop punctuating his sentences with the _Bones_ that slips from his tongue, and both forget, a little, about who they were _before_. Once he even calls her Dr. Brennan, annoyed and flustered during another argument of theirs.

She passes the diner one evening; the red leather seats yield dust and the front window is clouded over—there's a notice on the door and it reads FOR LEASE. She stands in the middle of the pavement in solemn silence, as if something has died, somewhere; the feeling sweeps up her spine like the wind, blowing leaf skeletons along the concrete.

She thinks he'll miss their pie. It was good pie.

* * *

It starts with the smallest, most insignificant things: she starts fastening the buttons on her lab coat all the way up, taking smaller, more deliberate strides with an altered gait, and—he never thought he'd miss it—she stops pestering him for a gun.

She's examining a greenstick fracture on a tibia, when, leaning forward, she reaches to brush a wisp of hair from her eyes and he glimpses the gentle swell of her body under the coat.

He feels a strange bristling up the back of his neck, the same sensation he relinquishes seconds before whipping out his .22 and giving a speaker-clown three shots, execution style, to the head.

Her gaze flicker towards him suddenly, and he runs a hand down his tie, smoothing out non-existent creases in an attempt to appear nonchalant.

It's been four months _(he isn't supposed to be the one counting_) when something snaps, inside of him, while they're on the road and he's driving. Something needs to change.

"We need to talk, Bones."

* * *

_TBC_.

_A/N:_ This will actually get a little happier in later chapters. It's pretty hard to write angsty fanfiction right after watching an episode like Man In The Mud, but it works well enough for this story right now. Thanks for reading.


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